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Currently, bounties are used to obtain a proper answer. But only, at least, 2 days after being asked. It's a lot of time if you're a professional and you need that simple thing solved to keep going!

"There are reasons for that delay, you know?"

Of course I know, and I think the delay is set mostly because if everyone could set a bounty right from the beginning, people would start to look only on those questions.

But still, this is a feature that we have to consider. There are moments that we can't really wait and we know that no one will probably answer our question otherwise.

What if...

We are able to set special bounties after 1 hour, paying a fee of 50% to set it?

For example, you want to set a 100 reputation bounty before 2 days past. You will have to pay 150 rep, but the award will still worth 100.

This way, it will reduce the number of "emergency bounties", and consequently, the number of users that won't answer to normal questions to wait for the bounty.

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    If it's that urgent, maybe you should consider hiring a freelancer.
    – Taryn
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 17:22
  • 1
    Also see its-time-to-remove-the-bounty-delay
    – juergen d
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 17:37
  • Are you aware that bounties make the question immune to closure and deletion? Enabling this would allow many more low quality questions to stick around, and require moderator effort to clean up. Also, the old adage, "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine" comes to mind.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Feb 4, 2015 at 15:54

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I think the delay is set mostly because if everyone could set a bounty right from the beginning, people would start to look only on those questions.

Yes, and the delay allows the community to close questions that need closing before they get a bounty. Mind you, some questions that should be closed still manage to get a bounty but at least with the current system, we minimize the number of questions that should be closed and yet do manage to get a bounty. When a question that should be closed manages to get a bounty, it is not a small inconvenience: the only people who can directly close questions that have bounties on them are moderators. Everyone else has to call on a moderator to get the question closed. That's moderator time that could be used for something else.

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